Saturday, March 7, 2015

Film Review: Triad (2012)

"...has a lot of ambition,
but not enough time or skill to execute it properly."

Three friends join the triads and find themselves rising through the ranks one violent altercation after another...

Triad
is a film with a large scope squeezed into a comparably microscopic
runtime. The film primarily follows William (William Wai-Ting Chan) when
he joins the triads in order to protect his mother from other harassing
gang members. He joins the triads with his friends, Derek and Edward,
although they hardly have any development or interaction. Anyway, William graduates
from college and continues to rise through the ranks. You'll see
practically everything here: violent triad fights, cheesy romance,
corrupt business, legitimate business, some backstabbing, and so on. The
ending was disappointingly cliché and predictable.

Triad is ultimately
very disappointing. First of all, the film has too much story for such a
short runtime. The film wants to introduce us to three characters, show
their struggles and relationships, their come-up, and so on, but it's
too much. Worst of all, it wants to introduce us to the inner-workings
of the triad and the overall business. Imagine trying to fit all of that
into a mere 90 minutes – impossible! Another major gripe: every other
scene in this film feels like a music video! You'll watch one scene of
predictable dialogue or violence, followed by a music video montage,
then another predictable scene, and so on. It creates a very bizarre and
inconsistent flow – it almost doesn't even feel like you're watching a
movie, more like you're watching a collection of music videos.

There
are only a few aspects of the film that I actually enjoyed – mostly due
to my love for crime and gangster films. I'm always up for a good
come-up and comeuppance story. Triad has that. Sure, it may be cliché,
predictable, and terribly inconsistent, but it has an interesting story.
Some of the fight scenes were decent, too. I emphasize some because
some of the other fight scenes were also bad. The melodrama may be effective
for some audience members, but it failed to land for me. Again, some
scenes were effective, but most were duds. The romance was completely
ineffective, though. As you can see, the bad in this film easily outweighs the decent.

On
that point, most of the performances were at least decent. Some of the
actors felt miscast, though. I did enjoy Patrick Tam's performance the
most – he felt the most grounded in reality. The music was also decent,
but overwhelming. Like I said, there's a music video between every scene
in this film. I love films with great music, but it needs
to be seamless to work – this is overdone. I did not like Daniel Yee
Heng Chan's direction, it was mostly ineffective and inconsistent; with a
little more time, though, he might have been able to flesh out the characters and story – too bad. The writing, however, is more disappointing. This
film had six writers, and all the audience gets is a
been-there-done-that experience with flawed execution.

Overall,
Triad is a mediocre film. Like its characters, it has a lot of ambition,
but not enough time or skill to execute it properly. Instead of a
classic gangster experience, you get a collection of music videos with
some melodrama in-between. If you love gangster/crime films, especially
from China, you've seen this film before and it was likely a
better experience. If you're like me – you love crime films and have
nothing better to do for 90 minutes – this is only worth a stream. I
applaud it for its scope, but it really needed less music videos and at
least an extra hour of effective character development to really work.